Captain Daddy and I almost didn’t get married based on vastly differing spiritual beliefs. All of that now seems like the sort of completely irrelevant nonsense that young people fixate on when making monumental decisions like who to spend the rest of their lives with, unaware that it’s actually anxiety, boredom and the laundry that will do you in, not God.
Religion rarely comes up around here. But it does have its moments, and it’s true that the Chickens get vastly different results depending on who they hit up for information on the subject.
Friday, Chicken Noodle approaches:
“What are we doing for Easter, Mom?”
Captain Daddy was nowhere in sight. This one was mine.
“Going to Grammy and Grandpa’s for an Easter egg hunt.”
Her face crumpled. “But we have to go to church!”
Curious. Where on Earth could she have gotten this radical idea? I doubted it was Captain Daddy. He doesn’t actually go to church anymore, just occasionally frets that he’s failing as a parent and going straight to hell because he doesn’t.
I looked at her inquisitively.
“Maddy said!” Ah. Maddie. In her Kindergarten class. Whose father is a minister.
“Hmm.” I considered. “Well, it’s true that Easter is actually a religious holiday. It’s about Jesus.”
“Who’s Jesus?”
I told you religion doesn’t come up much around here.
Knowing that if Captain Daddy were here, this conversation would now veer confusingly into talk of the flesh of God, and perhaps, gruesome-yet-apparently-necessary description of the crucifixion, instead I delivered up the child-appropriate version of what I actually believe about Jesus.
“He’s a famous and really wonderful man from history.”
Noodle contemplated this.
“So we’re not going to church?”
“Well, sort of. We’re going to the church of Grammy, Grandpa, chocolate and love. It’s quite nice, really.”
Publishing May 17 is my travel guidebook, Day Trips From Portland, from Globe Pequot Press.
I won the Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives essay contest.
I had to write that twice because I still can’t quite believe it.
Yesterday I received a very unusual phone call, especially in these days of ubiquitous electronic conversation.
“This is my favorite phone call of the year,” said the magazine’s editor. “You won the essay contest.”
In response, I said nothing. I was too shocked.
I’ve entered this annual literary contest maybe seven times and never even been a finalist. And I won! Hot damn.
My essay is titled “The Friday’s Trilogy” and it’s an excerpt from my book, Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, to be released this summer. It’s about one of the worst periods of my life, when I bottomed out in Portland 16 years ago.
Here’s what judge Debra Gwartney of Pacific University’s MFA program said:
"(I chose) The Friday's Trilogy, which I found to be fresh, alive, exciting and bold writing. I had some trouble following the first few sentences, but once I was in, I was in. A compelling piece of writing, heartbreaking and redemptive. Hard to pull off without being sappy, and yet she does."
“I’ll come back to earth soon,” I said to Guy Maynard at the end of our conversation.
“Well, don’t come back down too soon,” he said. “Moments like these are too few in our world.”
There will be a public reading of winning essays on the University of Oregon campus, May 4, 7 p.m.
